A thousand words
by smarty0007
Summary: Hermione is working on a project, but there is one last troublesome obstacle getting in the way.


Disclaimer: Thanks to JKR for creating these characters. I hope I can do them justice. Thank you for reading!

Hermione tilted her head back to the left slightly. _No, it wouldn't do._ She sighed and stepped back from the wall a little to pinch the bridge of her nose with her fingers and close her eyes. This was frustrating. How she was to breach the subject with Ron was still beyond her.

By the time she was only four years old, Hermione had developed a knack for climbing up into the hall closet's shelving and somehow managing to bypass a slew of crammed-in Christmas decorations and transfer several heavy hatboxes of family history to the makeshift fort in her bedroom. The first time this happened, Dr. and Dr. Granger found her hours later, sprawled under the roof of scavenged blankets, humming to herself amid piles and piles of photographs, sorting and sometimes exclaiming with delight or _tsk_ing waspishly (or pronouncedly _grownupishly_, as her father amusedly remarked to all his pub mates) at such silly faces her father would put on.

The two parents turned to each other upon discovering her safely in her room with equally bewildered expressions. After a moment of telepathic exchange, they silently agreed it was best they didn't question her mysterious methods. It was enough that their daughter had something to keep her busy—what with the distracting bullies at day school and the strange incidents listed on her weekly report, they had enough to worry about.

"_Father_, be _serious_," she liked to say, brandishing the _father_ to match the graveness of the moment instead of her usual _daddy_. "_Mummy_ never makes such _lucrative_ faces in her pictures. See?" waving a Polaroid of the quaint set of three huddled on the sand along the French coast. Her mum was smiling contentedly in the picture, holding one hand of a newly-walking Hermione while her dad supported the other one, raising his eyebrows in mid-laugh watching his daughter struggling to pull free.

"Ah, love, don't you see that I make these faces because I simply can't contain my joy of having you for a daughter?" and he would plop down like a giant inside her tent and send her into a fit of giggles with a well-placed tickle.

To say that Hermione was amazed at the profound complexity of wizard photography would have been an understatement. She was absolutely floored before she even saw a painting—her shiny new edition of _Hogwarts, a History_ clearly put it that the Fat Lady was one of the most beautifully restored pieces in the castle, and arguably in all the kingdom, and added in a suspiciously dry tone that she would tell you proudly of it herself if you had nowhere to be for the next half-hour. What were the physics behind such a work? What media did the artists use? Could anyone do it or did you need a practiced talent for such things, just like with Muggles? (She practiced this word—Muggles—as frequently as possible in order to prepare for her first day as a _witch_.)

She was slightly disappointed when she discovered that, while wizard paintings were quite flamboyantly alive and loudly boasted of it through raucous singing and even _swearing_, photographs were more like silent movies. For the time being, she must put away the desire to see if she could retroactively magic her parents' family photos into revealing their secrets… to question why her dad made that particular face at that particular moment, what her mum was thinking about as she stared vaguely off at the distant tree line and unaware of being photographed. Sometimes she mused what she would ask her late grammum, sitting in an armchair with a cup of tea and a book by the fire.

But lately, she was having trouble with even the slightly less-impressive, but still amazing, features of magic photographs. It was just as well they couldn't speak… Hermione snapped out of her reverie and turned back to the narrow wall in front of her. It was wonderful, really, how she had managed to split it evenly along the length of the hallway with various stages of life and multiple limbs of the family tree. On one end the Grangers' large pearly teeth and varying degrees of big hair dotted the wall, stationary images for the most part, but a few recent ones moving as regularly as the rest of them. On the other end Weasley-red shocked the peripheral at first but gradually got easier to look at once a person had time to adjust. Fred waved at her again from his place next to George, and it gave her a slight pang. That particular one was also getting easier to look at, but for different reasons.

In the middle was a more jumbled collection of frames, one of them displaying an exasperated Harry chasing after little James on the new Nimbus-for-Tykes Ron bought for him on his last birthday. Hermione shook her head and sighed as she looked at the picture of Ginny beaming as she held her squirming nephew Fred in a stronger grip than most people gave her credit for. It was alarming how much trouble that boy had already caused at the Burrow. Molly seemed to take it well, merely grumbling to herself as the newest version of George's Extendable-Ears was discovered winding its way throughout the stairways. Hermione swore she noticed the corners of Molly's mouth twitching in suppressed amusement, but then again, maybe it was just suppressed rage for George's sake.

Then the perpetrator Hermione was agonizing over made its way back to her attention. It was a large, currently empty, frame at the center of the array and about eye-level. It was apparently the most prominent picture on the wall, easily visible from the small dining set across the room, but at the moment a thousand words would be too much for the blank stretch of gray, except for one—_suspicious_.

Suddenly, Hermione felt a large arm slide across her collar bone and roughly pull her into the tall frame of Ron, freshly in from a kip on the grass. She breathed in deeply and closed her eyes. "Hermione," she felt her own name more than she heard it as it came out of his chest and went into her back, "I know you're busy with this photo project, but let it rest for a bit and come outside into the sun."

"I'm just about finished up, Ron, there are maybe a few more from Hogwarts I need to choose—"

"Hermione," he whined, cutting her off with a small squeeze, "this weather has been absolutely brilliant and you've been inside for _days_. _Vampires_ get out more than this!" and he pressed a sloppy kiss to her neck before proceeding to further his point with a crude example of vampirism. Laughing, Hermione turned around and punched him half-heartedly away until she was free from danger. Looking up into his face, she noticed his eyes traveling towards the same frame she was just observing.

Ron squinted. "Hey, that's not…" he trailed off, puzzled.

"Yes… It is."

"Has it… been like this for a while now?"

"Ever since I hung the frame to get the layout centered." She sighed for a third time and leaned back against him resignedly. Ron whistled.

"Maybe they're there when we're not in the room."

"I doubt it. Really, Ron, how are we going to explain this one?" He was quiet for a while, and without looking she fancied his ears were changing shades a bit from imagining a future scenario involving his mum and _remarks_. Hermione was less worried about Molly and more worried about James or Fred, or God forbid, _George_. What would George say?

Hermione ran her hands through her hair. It had been growing into a larger and larger cloud around her head throughout the morning, and Ron had made a point to periodically check on her to secretly observe the metamorphosis from calm-and-businesslike Hermione into the frustrated-and-crackling version he liked best while arguing or doing other—stimulating—things.

"Well, how about we avoid the situation all together and put a different picture there?" Ron proffered hesitantly. He stooped quickly to glance over the many similar versions of him, Hermione, and Harry with their arms slung around each other and grinning like they had just shared a joke. He picked one up at random and was about to hand it to her, but Hermione's eyes were still focused on the wall.

"And not have our wedding portrait up? But Ron, people will notice!"

Ron cleared his throat carefully, "I think they'll notice an _empty_ frame more, love. Seriously, as soon as we have George and the family over—"

"All right, all right, but I can't bear not to display this one somewhere in our home! We spent a _fortune_ on those pictures—"

And with that Ron deftly lifted the empty frame off its hook and carried it swiftly into the bedroom to prop it up on the dresser. Before Hermione could say another word he was back to retrieve her and, as the door banged shut behind them, his last comment was, "Problem solved."


End file.
